soledad penadés

After the "seriousness" of previous installments, I believe Arthur was like: bah, let's just have fun! And he wrote this kind of lightweight entertaining sci-fi novel.

It doesn't quite get as many moments of 'life or death' for the whole of humankind as the previous ones. And it has so many space pop moments, such as the whole idea of camping on the Halley comet, that you can't really take it too seriously. But you still keep flipping the pages to find out what is going to happen.

And it would not be a Clarke novel without an overwhelmingly male cast, and the only decidedly "bad" human actor in the plot is... a woman. Of course! 😏

The other thing that is getting annoying is the repetitive self-quoting from previous books. I guess he's counting on readers maybe not having read the previous books, so he goes and quotes at length. It gets to the point where one just rolls her eyes and flips past the pages in order to skip the self-quotes and find the new stuff.

Readable, but getting increasingly dated gender-wise each time I re-read it.